Developing a Programming Priority System

We use the following metrics (some artifical) to help us prioritize work:

- Due date of the task or milestone
- value of the task or module (not the entire project)
- value of rewards for satisfying the customer. We weight ours by likelyhood ofreceiving said award. Example: There is a 50% chance if the client is happy we'll win a 100K project = .5 * 100K = 50K.

That is pretty much how we run our successful IT shop.

Hope that helps!

Andy

What level of requests are you dealing with? Projects, bug reports, both?

If you have no other information available, first in, first out is as good a way of prioritizing as any.

Another qualification is whether a bug makes the softwareunusable for a user. Give these top priority. If the problem is an annoyance or has a work around, it gets a lower priority.

I dislike it it, but another qualification is the size of the client. Pragmattically, a large client's problems will be prioritiaed higher than a small client's problems.

This is pretty subjective, but if you want to automate it, you could create a simple database and assign values such as low/0, medium/1, high/2 for various qulification columns and sort them inany order you please.